Benedict Cumberbatch on The Fifth Estate: I Looked So Much Like Julian Assange I Considered Swapping Places with Him

For his role as Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate, Benedict Cumberbatch was required to wear white wigs, fake teeth, and contact lenses—all amounting to a “spooky” resemblance to the WikiLeaks founder.

“It was, like, ‘O.K., you really do look like him. Maybe we could take you to the embassy and you could spring him out,’” Cumberbatch said at a Cinema Society screening on Friday. “Then I said, ‘Well, where does that leave me? Am I going to be incarcerated in the converted bathroom behind Harrod’s for the rest of my life?’ Jokes aside, his real predicament is really precarious. You play someone, you empathize with them . . . whatever cases there are for and against him, I feel for a guy who’s in that predicament.”

The actor says most of the questions he’s been asked are not about the film’s costumes but about the controversial nature of WikiLeaks. “This is actually the first time I’ve been asked what it was like to be involved as an actor, rather than the issues,” he said. “I’m happy to talk about the wigs,” he added, laughing.

Assange asked the actor permission before publishing his open letter criticizing his participation in the movie, which details the WikiLeaks founder’s road to exile. “He’s a polite man,” Cumberbatch told VF Daily. “To an extent. If you don’t cross him, he’s a polite man.”

Cumberbatch has responded to Assange’s letter, although he has not made his comments public. “Like I said to him at the time, I had a gentlemen’s agreement not to publish,” Cumberbatch said. “It would have been easy for me to sort of drift into Vanity Fair territory and go, ‘Here’s the correspondence,’ but I didn’t want to do that. I took our exchange as being a personal one, and something that was to do with a private consultation as to whether I should do this film or not.”

Cumberbatch considers the movie a complex and important story on a person whom he did not want in any sense to vilify. “This is a three-dimensional portrait of a human being. It’s a skewed point of view because, of course, it comes from Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s book, and the Guardian, who we know had pretty acrimonious relationships with Julian,” Cumberbatch said. “But that doesn’t then necessitate that I am trying to facilitate a State Department or right-wing propagandist’s point of view, as he’s trying to make out. I wrote that response, pretty clearly, pretty politely, and took my time with it, and it was a larger e-mail than he sent to me.”